blizzard

Starcraft II has been a target for Alphabet’s DeepMind AI research for a while now – the UK AI company took on Blizzard’s sci-fi strategy game starting last year, and announced plans to create an open AI research environment based on the game to make it possible for others to contribute to the effort of creating a virtual agent who can best the top human StarCraft players in… Read More

E-sports is maturing at a rapid pace. What once was only found on a Twitch stream here and there is now becoming the new favored spectator sport for an entire generation of gamers. Blizzard recently announced the first city-based e-sports league for the ultra-popular game Overwatch. As a follow-up, Blizzard has outlined some of the standards for signing and employing professional players. Read More

Have you always wanted to check out that StarCraft game you’d heard so much about, but somehow managed to go nearly 20 years without buying a copy? Good news! Nearly two decades after its 1998 release, StarCraft is now free. Legally! Read More

AIs have more or less mastered chess, Go and a number of other highly cerebral games — how will they do on something like StarCraft II, which combines high-level strategy with the need for quick reaction times and tactical thinking? Probably great, honestly. And this collaboration between Google’s DeepMind and Blizzard will ensure it. Read More

459,000 years. That’s how long Twitch users spent watching other people play video games last year, and Facebook wants a piece of the pie.
It might sound weird, but e-sports are wildly popular, and Facebook is getting serious about owning those video views. A source tipped us off that Facebook has hired e-sports super-connector and former professional gamer Stephen… Read More

In case you were not tuned into the finals of WCS Europe earlier today, Blizzard, a popular gaming company, announced that the final chapter of its Starcraft II will touch down on November 10.
The third iteration, called Legacy of the Void, will at once be a computer game, and Blizzard’s statement regarding the long-term viability of Starcraft proper as an esport. Starcraft… Read More

Who will survive the Tomb of Immortal Darkness? It’s a new five-man dungeon coming to World of Warcraft that’s “deep beneath the crumbling tombstones of Duskwood’s Raven Hill Cemetery.” (Incidentally, Duskwood is my favorite old world area. Oh, the memories.) The dungeon uses Deep Dark technology to give players the ultimate challenge: navigating an instance in… Read More

Latest Crunch Report

This just in: this year’s Blizzcon will be on October 21 and 22 in Anaheim. “Blizzcon? What’s that?” That’s what Blizzard calls its annual “celebration of the global player communities surrounding Blizzard Entertainment’s Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo universes.” Two days of fun, in other words. Read More

And now for some World of Warcraft news. Blizzard says that they’ve sold some 4.7 million copies of Cataclysm since its release one month ago. Most of the sales came on the very first day of release, with 3.3 million copies moving on day one. Mighty impressive. Read More

Blizzard has confirmed its next-generation MMO. It’s currently called, or at least referred to as, Titan, and it was first noticed in the leaked roadmap that surfaced a few days ago. The company isn’t too happy that the project’s existence leaked (a Blizzard China manager resigned in wake of the leak), and that it’s currently working on recruiting “the best talent… Read More

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has become the fastest selling PC game of all time. Blizzard sold 3.3 million copies in a mere 24 hours. Assuming everyone paid $40 for the game, that works out to $132 million in first-day sales alone. Not too shabby! Read More

Yikes. It’s no surprise that the Blizzard China manager who let this slide leak has been fired. I’m surprised he wasn’t “relocated” to a labor camp in the deep north or something. It pretty much leaks Blizzard’s plans for the next five years, though a savvy analyst might have come to the same conclusions. Read More

At midnight tonight (Pacific Standard Time, leaving those of us on the east coast looking like fools) Blizzard flips the switch on the World of Warcraft: Catalysmservers. It’s a pretty huge deal, and not just because it’s the latest expansion (leaks reports indicate at least two more expansions within the next three years) to the game that recently turned six years old. Consider this… Read More

We are three weeks away from the release of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, and Blizzard has let it be known that there will be several worldwide launch events that may be worth investigating. For those of you in the US, get thee to the Fry’s Electronics in Fountain Valley, Calif. where you can partake in the launch festivities. There’s going to be a dance contest! If East Side… Read More

This is pretty nuts. The Diablo series has always been a mainstay of PC gaming — I mean, the entire game is clicking on things. Yet now Blizzard is hiring lead developers for a console version of the game. How are these poor bastards expected to click?!
Update: Not so much! Read More

Who can forget the Red Shirt Guy? He’s the young man who, at Blizzcon last week, told Blizzard something about Falstad Wildhammer being on the Council of Three Hammers. I don’t know, I’m not as familiar with the World of Warcraft lore as I’d like to be. Which is not to say I’m above killing hours on WoWWiki looking up this or that faction, but clearly I’m not… Read More

You can now pre-order the digital download edition of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm from Blizzard. Buying this particular edition ensures that you’ll be able to play the game the minute Blizzard turns on the Cataclysm servers, which, incidentally, happens at 12:01am PST on December 7. Read More